This blog will post detailed news items about GLBT issues. Some of the issues include the "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and gay marriage. Please note that my main website is DOASKDOTELL.COM (link on my Profile).

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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Friday, May 31, 2013

The Washington Post Style section on Friday, May 31, 2013
reports on a retreat in Pennsylvania, the LGBTQ Muslim and Partners Retreat,
story by Emily Wax, here.

One transgendered (Male to Female) person had converted from
Baptist to Islam, finding evangelical Christianity more inimical to her than
Islam. But generally, Islam has been a very tribal culture, insisting on gender norms (and strict segregation) to preserve its culture. In Saudi Arabia, it is almost impossible for an unmarried adult woman to travel alone.

The Washington Post says it was the first media organization
to be granted access to the retreat.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Robert McCartney reports in the Washington Post Metro
section Thursday that the Washington area council of the Boy Scouts of America
has already lost some donors, and now is trying to emphasize “faith” rather
than sexuality. McCartney comes back and
asks why a nationally recognized character-building organization can’t accept atheists.
The link is here.

Although the BSA is a private organization, and
constitutional libertarians (including Gays and Lesbians for Individual
Liberty) agreed with the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling in 2000, that the BSA
could do what it wanted, it’s true that in the past it has had tremendous influence
on character norms. When I was in the
Army (Vietnam era, stateside), officers were expected to participate in
sponsorship.

So what is the BSA’s message? Beyond honor to duty, God, country? One of the values is self-reliance, taking
care of oneself in practical ways, particularly in emergencies. “Be prepared.” As an immediate corollary, be prepared to
take care of others in practical ways.
That obviously matters in a world that is unstable because of an
increasingly volatile climate and becoming unstable because of bad actors and
enemies – although all of these factors have always existed.

So why this fetishal obsession in some quarters with male
homosexuality? Of course, it’s easy to
say that a lot of it is religious. Or,
as Bill Maher says, “religulous”. Then
there’s the idea of privacy and close quarters.
The United States military has learned to cope with that (along with “unit
cohesion”) But, here, some say, you’re
talking about underage teens, so that’s a difference.

Overt exhibition of
sexuality is supposed to have no place in scouting activities. All of this comes down to outward acceptance
of an immutable “property” of a personality.

When I was a boy, I was pushed for a while into Cub
Scouting, and even into “football”. It
didn’t go very far. It seemed that
society was sending conflicting messages.
Girls were to be respected and sexual explorations were to be
avoided. No problem, But then it morphed into something else. Girls were to be protected, even sacrificially, because they were future
mothers. Boys were to channel some of
their energies, at least indirectly, into the reproductive needs of the family
and community. Already there was a
logical contradiction at some level. Sex
now was bad but eventual fatherhood was almost mandatory. Homosexuality made one an enemy of the future
of the family. At an individual level,
that hardly made sense.

At least the recent episodes of the soap “Days of our Lives”
have presented an interesting view of homosexuality and reproduction.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

The New York Times on Saturday has a major story by James B.
Stewart, supplemented by a video online, about the unwillingness of Exxon-Mobil
to add explicit protection of gays and lesbians for discrimination in its HR
policy.

The story relates that all other major oil companies have
implemented such policies. Mobil had done so, but when Exxon bought Mobil, it
ended the policy for the acquired employees.

The article reports that Exxon may lose some talent over the
issue, and that at least one executive in Europe refused to come to the US
without domestic partnership benefits.

Exxon claims it has a broad-based non-discrimination policy
and does not need to name sexual orientation specifically. It does add explicit
protections in areas required by local law.

One test case showed a resume from an openly gay applicant
was not viewed as favorably as a lesser qualified one, but workplace
consultants say that personal issues should not be brought up in job
applications. But there is of course the
likelihood of a company’s checking social media, which could result in blanket
discrimination.

The report also mentions that a major executive at Exxon has
ties to the Boy Scouts of America, which “partially” reversed its ban
yesterday.

I have held Exxon stock for years, since 1977, but recently
an investment advisor sold it as part of a portfolio restructuring. The gay issue had nothing to do with the
action. I have often referred to Exxon publications on my Issues blog when
writing about energy issues.

In 1983, while living in Dallas, I did have a job issue with
Arco, which did not result in an offer.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

The Boy Scouts of America has voted, in a rank-and-file poll
taken at headquarters in Grapevine. TX, to end the ban on open gays as
scouts. It will keep the ban as scout
leaders. The MSNBC story is (website url) here.

The BSA also says it will not tolerate conduct with
propagates any sexual expression in its activities.

The vote for lifting the ban was apparently about 60%.

Some say that the BSA could lose 10% of its membership and
many sponsors, but the BSA has lost many sponsors already because of the ban,
especially those affiliated with local governments.

When I was in the Army (1968-19070), field grade officers
(at Fort Eustis) and probably even junior officers were expected to participate
as leaders.

The policy had been in effect for 103 years. Some reports say that the specific ban on gays by BSA was implemented in 1991 (two years before Clinton introduced "don't ask. don't tell, don't pursue" for gays in the military), on a theory that scouts had to be "morally straight". Put bluntly, the BSA didn't want to allow influences that could contradict a belief that every boy would grow up to become a father, raise a family, and give his parents (owed) lineage.

The Mormon Church (Latter Day Saints) sponsors about 25% of
troops today but said it would not oppose lifting the ban.

The new policy starts Jan. 1, 2014.

The BSA says it has no plans for further review of the ban
on leaders. It’s not clear whether there
is “asking”. Some media outlets suggest that the BSA really will revisit the policy on adult leaders in 2014.

The New York Times had an interesting editorial ("Scouting's Move Toward Equality") Friday, May 25, here. There is an interesting observation that the Scouting policy (at least on adults) says "If you;re gay, keep quiet, because there is something wrong with you." I know the feeling. It's a quote of a quote.

Senate Democrats allowed a provision that would grant visa
privileges to same-sex couple partners (legally married in other countries) to
be removed, to appease Republicans and get a bill passed. Of course, gay
activists are outraged. David Nakamura
has a story in the Washington Post Thursday May 23, p. A3,here.

The story has a video report.

The president has warned that it may not be possible to get
all progressive ideas passed on this bill.
But why is this so much harder than was lifting DADT?

There is a possibility that if the Supreme Court invalidates
DOMA (completely, not just procedurally) in June, that the way for same-sex
partner immigration would be opened automatically anyway.

Picture: Ballston Common Mall picture of a Chick-fil-A ad for "tailgating", whatever that means. For the Libertarian Part\y, the word applied to a technique for getting signatures during ballot access petitioning. ABC's "The View" has explained that "chicken" has become a "stereotyping" food because it was the only livestock slaves were allowed to raise before the Civil War. That sounds like an interesting paradox.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

The New York Times has a disturbing report indicating that
hate crimes against gay men have increased in the City in the past year,
including a shocking fatal shooting in the West Village of a gay man by another
who had recently left prison and who had threatened a bartender some moments
before. The NYT story of the slaying of
Mark Carson by Elliot Morales, by Marc Santora and Joseph Goldstein, appears
here.

I lived in NYC at 11tn and Broadway from 1874 through 1978
and never encountered any problems, although I was called the f-word once at 5th
Avenue and around 11th St.

I have made numerous short trips to the city since 2010 and
have encountered no problems in either Greenwich Village or the Hells Kitchen
area. The atmosphere seems more tense in Washington DC than in New York.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Virginia law, passed in February 2012, allows private
adoption agencies to refuse same-sex couples or gay people to adopt children
based on private or religious beliefs, according to a Washington Blade story in
February, 2012, here.

But on Friday, Equality Virginia pointed out the apparent
hypocrisy in Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s “Campaign for 1000” to find a
thousand more families to adopt children in the Commonwealth.

One out of four foster children not adopted will be
incarcerated within two years of turning 18, and 50% will become homeless.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Could an executive order from the President forbidding any
federal contractor discrimination based on sexual orientation pave the way, in
practical terms, to Congress’s being willing to pass ENDA (the Employment N
on-Discrimination Act), introduced in 1993.

So suggests Jeffrey Marburg-Goodman on p. A17 of the Friday
Washington Post. The title in print is “Signing
on to employment equality”. Online, it’s
more specific: “An executive order could end LGBT discrimination in contracts”,
link here.

Wouldn’t the official repeal of the military “don’t ask don’t
tell” in 2011 put practical pressure on the system to end civilian employment
discrimination? We’ve covered he history
of security clearances (especially my own) here before. (The CIA has been OK with openly gay enployees since the early 1990s -- as long as it's "open".) In practice, in commercial settings with
mainframe information technology , I never experienced any real discrimination
after 1974. As an individual
contributor, management was most concerned with whether one did his job, Even in “conservative” Dallas in the1980s
working for a credit reporting company during the height of the AIDS epidemic
publicity, I encountered no problems. I had no direct problems as a civilian employee working for USLICO, a life
insurance company that catered to military officers in the 1990s. (I wonder how USAA was then.) Private industry, in my experience, tended to
embrace diversity, particularly in Minneapolis after USLICO was bought by NWNL
which became ReliaStar, and then ING.
ReliaStar had public diversity meetings within the company.

There have existed libertarian philosophical arguments
against anti-discrimination ordinances, some of them publicized by GLIL (Gays
and Lesbians for Individual Liberty) in the 1990s, in the newsletter “The Quill”
and in press releases (especially an unfortunate one that I recall in
1996). For example, Hooter’s might be
jealous of its aggressively heterosexual image.
On the other hand, it’s common these days to find heterosexuals (men and
women) bartending in gay establishments.

Wouldn’t the lifting of the military ban put a lot of psychological
pressure on the Boy Scouts? Maybe it
has, but there are residual problems, to be sure. In the 1980s, the BSA actually employed
mainframe programmer-analysts and showed up at jobs fairs in Dallas. I didn’t bite.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

I just wanted to carry on some thoughts coming behind my “anthropology”
exercise yesterday.

That is to note that I did not have the opportunity to be “desired”
in social situations where lookism drives the action – drives and discos. I did not visit a gay bar for the first time
until March, 1973, at age 29. I remember
walking around the block housing Uncle Charley’s South in NYC twice before
having the nerve to go in and enjoy the “goody line” (the free Sunday afternoon
buffet). I was already balding and less
than “perfect”. So I never enjoyed being
in the position to command the attention from others with personal charisma and
attractiveness from others.

I did, of course, learn the whole body of material about
personal growth and the “polarities” as was taught by Paul Rosenfels at the
Ninth Street Center in the East Village in New York in the 1970s (now, it is,
posthumously, the Paul Rosenfeils Community.

In this line of thinking, selectivity and independence were
considered good. And they are. If you
can do your own thing – today with the help of the Internet – you are more
likely to attract the people you want.
That can present a “chicken and egg” problem, as I noted on my main blog
Tuesday (May 14).

But “doing your own thing” first requires stability – and externally
caused difficulties (natural or hostile) can throw you into interdependence on
others in unwelcome ways. Not everyone
has the opportunity to achieve things on their own, less be naturally appealing
in public venues. So we seem to wind
down to a profound social justice problem.

I haven’t been to clubs as much as usual in 2013, for a
variety of reasons – including increasing content workload. People do approach me in bars. Maybe a little over half of the approaches
are “unwelcome” (but some are). I
realize there is a bit of an attitude about this.

Once, back in October
2001 (shortly after 9/11, when people were a little nervous), in a popular
Minneapolis bar, an African American woman approached me asking when my
birthday was an which birthday it would be.
She was protecting someone else from unwanted interest. You can imagine how that felt.

By the way, not being too “popular” in young adulthood may
have saved my life. I’m still
around. The HIV epidemic, as playwright
Larry Kramer (“The Normal Heart”) once said, enforced a kind of reverse
Darwinism.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

It strikes me that the “Will and Sonny” subplot in “Days of
our Lives” says something about “nature” and male homosexuality that, in the
grand scheme of things, makes sense to an alien anthropologist.

Will Horton, supposedly about 19 (Chandler Massey) is
turning out to be the alpha male, almost like one in a lion pride. He had a quick fling with ex-girl friend Gabi
anyway, resulting in her pregnancy, after “ex-con” Nick Fallon (character whom
the show has ruined, played by Blake Berris) fell in love with her and
announced marriage. It got complicated,
but Will also won back the loyalty of his boyfriend Sonny (Freddie Smith), one of
the few “sane” or “steady” characters in the show.

So here Will spreads his own genes, to be around a few
billion years from now when mankind has to move to Mars, Europa, or Titan because the Sun becomes a Red Giant. And he
can enlist two other men besides himself (Sonny and Nick) to help support his
daughter and give his own “genes” a competitive advantage in the millennia to
follow him. The daughter could have
three daddies (although Nickie may well be headed back to jail, given his
behavior). What a beautiful strategy for
giving your own progeny a competitive advantage. Get another man to feel attracted to you and
help you raise your kids, when he won’t have his own.

Will has shown the ability to dominate others before, such as when he went head-to-head and tried to blackmail EJ. Will also might become a chess master. (He needs to play better against the Dragon Sicilian, and maybe the Sveshnikov.)

The bisexual character Nolan Ross in ABC's "Revenge" also offers interesting perspectives on how nature really works. And I guess "Modern Family" gives us some lessons about hidden nature, if we think about it.

Think about it, Most
social mammals have “alpha males” and in many species, not all males
reproduce. Lions, wolves, and some primates prefer that only a few "fit" males reproduce and carry genes forward. The idea of “alpha male” even
crosses species. (In “The Life of Pi”, a
teenage boy convinces a tiger to obey him because the tiger figures out he has
a better chance of surviving and reproducing himself if he takes orders from
the boy when they are at sea.) The boy
can make tools and catch fish to feed them both; the big cat cannot.

Nobody can say this is idea for morality, politics, or
sociology. But it is certainly natural
and happens all the time in the animal world.
In human society, left unchecked, it could encourage authoritarianism
eventually.

We all know that when we feel “attracted” to someone and
that attraction is ratified, it seems like an existential matter, of real
importance. The moral problem comes from
the need to make a relationship permanent, at least long enough for children to
be raised, and now, for parents to be taken care of. It can be a challenge to retain that passion,
not only as the partners age, but when misfortune befalls one of them.

Angelina Jolie’s recent decision illustrates
that point in the heterosexual world. It’s
more likely to be an issue today than it was a half century ago because people
live longer and medicine can catch problems and prevent death in people who
have the emotional support to accept invasive procedures and changes to their
looks. I had a little preview of this
back in 1978 myself.

The "equality" debate used to be not so much about same-sex couples, as it was the tension between the "unmarried" and "childless" (higher taxes, often, but more disposable income) and "families with children" (without the marriage penalty). That was the spin in the 90s. Should the childless set themselves aside to raise OPC, other people's children? It often happens in families after tragedies (the "Raising Helen" problem of raising a sibling's children -- also in the ABC TV series "Summerland"). But it can also happen within same-sex couples.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Anderson Cooper has a brief report on the anti-gay rants of
a certain Charles Worley at the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, NC,
about 50 miles north of Charlotte, oddly a town where Apple has a major data
center.

Cooper interviews a member of the church about the curious
anti-logic of Worley’s prescriptions, and gets nowhere with logic. The link is here. I won’t embed this one. Cooper has said before that he doesn't like to run stories on anti-gay religious extremists, because it gives them the attention they crave. But he did it this time.

Bur the Christian Post ran a story in which Worley “justified”
his rants, that are on the level of Fred Phelps of Westboro, and even Paul
Cameron back in the 1980s. All of this is pretty graphic. It does remind one of the “quarantine” talk
of the 1980s, and worse.

Update:

Here's the church, here's the people, open your hand, here's the steeple.

Note the sign: "Working for God isn't a part time job". There are a lot of small fundamentalist church in the area, and many of the homeowners around Maiden appear to be poor. The church is about four miles east of town.

This year’s gay pride celebration in Loring Park would certainly
be one of the largest ever. In terms of surface area covered, the Twin Cities Pride
celebration is one of the largest in the country, as just about every major
corporation or non-profit has a booth.
It usually occurs the last weekend of June, with website here. In 2002, the Saturday booths endured
temperatures of 102F.

I lived in Minneapolis from 1997-2003 and became quite
familiar with the community, and with Pride Alive of the Minnesota AIDS
Project.

I’m also somewhat familiar with the State Capitol complex in
St. Paul. The Libertarian Party
sponsored numerous anti-tax rallies on the steps there. And in 1998, when I was injured in a freak
accident in a convenience store in downtown Minneapolis, my own attorney
happened to be a state representative, so I visited the Capitol at least once.

I also remember the night that Gov. Jesse Ventura was
elected as an independent in 1998. I
also met Ventura in person at the HRC dinner in the Minneapolis convention center
just two weeks after 9/11 in 2001. I
remember all those days well.

Thursday, May 09, 2013

LGBT elderly people in some parts of New York State have a
new resource, HCR Home Care, which has been set up in conjunction with the Gay
Alliance of the Genessee Valley, as related in this Washington Blade story May
1, here.

The local Gannett "Democrat and Chronicle" has a story (paywall) (website url) here.

LGBT eldercare is slowly gaining attention in the media. On
my movies blog, on Sept. 24, the Arlington Agency for Aging (VA) screened the
documentary film “Gen Silent” (by Stu Maddox), which is reviewed on my Movies
blog at that date.

And the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore will screen “Before
You Know It” by P. J. Raval, about three aging gay men in different towns. This wasn’t convenient right now, but I put
it in my Netflix Save queue. I don’t yet know whether material in these two
films overlaps. The film showed at SXSW.
I don’t see a DVD purchase site yet, but I hope it shows up soon for
home viewing (possibly with Logo?)

LGBT people are likely to wind up caring for parents or
other relatives; older LGBT may lack the experience having raised families of
their own when they are “forced” into this filial duty,

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Delaware, “The Blue Hen State”, has become the eleventh (not
“eleventieth”) state to recognize same-sex marriage. The state Senate passed the relevant bill
12-9 (by one “field goal”) and the governor Jack Markell signed it into law
immediately. (Check the 1950 World Book
Encyclopedia on how the state got this name during the Revolutionary War.)

USA Today has a typical story here. It also offers a national map diagram the status of same-sex marriage today.

People will be able to enter into same-sex marriages on July
1.

Delaware is sort of a bizarre state, with no sales tax, but
very high tolls on I-95 through it, to get revenue from passers. The town of Rehoboth Beach attracts a gay
crowd from DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, but has had controversies over
noise. South of Rehoboth you have
Bethany Beach, which used to be a religious retreat. My first trip to the beach with my parents happened
in 1947 to Bethany when I was about to turn 4.
That’s one of my earliest memories.

Summer rentals in the beach towns are now outrageously
expensive, but a surprising number of older people – especially realtors and
people who own franchise businesses, live in Rehoboth year round, and tolerate
the hurricane risk. Rehoboth did not
have extensive damage from Sandy the way communities on the Jersey shore
did. I’ve only spent a weekend there once, in 1997,
when I had to go all the way to Dover to get a room. (Routes 9 and 1 traffic is always horrible,
because of the outlet malls without sales tax.) I usually make day trips most summers.

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

The Washington Blade is reporting that Chile has dropped its
gay male blood donation ban – not asking sexual orientation, but banning only
for risky behaviors within some recent period (twelve monhts). High risk behaviors are regarded the same regardless of gender of the partner.

The story has a curious public domain photo
that looks more like a conventional IV line (or possibly for platelet donation)
than a conventional blood donation.

The original story in the Santiago Tunes (English version) is by Elizabeth
Trovall, link here.

I can remember in the early 1980s, before AIDS was none,
that (in Dallas) banks included “be a
superdonor” pitches in their statements, which included platelet donation and
even bone marrow donation, which was just starting to become “popular” then.

I think that I last gave blood in 1981.

The history of Chile, by the way, was the subject of the recent film "No".

Saturday, May 04, 2013

The state of Maryland has told its state employees in
domestic partnerships that aren’t marriages, get married by the end of the
year, or lose partnership benefits. This
is seen as an “unintended consequence” of successfully passing gay marriage
last November (I had covered the governor’s signing ceremony March 1, 2012;
later opponents forced a referendum, but voters, in an encouraging turn of
direct democracy, approved gay marriage).

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Human Rights Campaign is reporting that Rhode Island
governor has signed into law a new marriage equality law, making Rhode Island
the tenth state (in addition to the District of Columbia) to offer full
marriage equality. The HRC story is here.

I know the state from a 2003 visit to the now late Gode
Davis, filmmaker trying to produce “American Lynching”, a project that is still
incomplete.

I understand that all six New England states offer marriage
equality. It makes the Boston Red Sox
look good.

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